Nearly everyone working on Nova Launcher has been laid off

Nearly the entire team working on Nova Launcher, one of the biggest names in Android homescreen replacements, has been laid off. The team is now down to just one full time developer: Kevin Barry, the launcher’s founder.

Barry said development will continue and that he will remain in charge of the project. But team members who were laid off said work on Nova will have to slow down, and Barry has already posted that he needs to “cut scope” on the next major version of Nova compared to what was initially planned.

“Development will undoubtedly slow with less people working on the app, but the current plan is for updates to continue in some form,” Rob Wainwright, one of the laid off developers, wrote in the project’s Discord.

Nova has been a standby in the Android Launcher community for years, offering a highly customizable twist on the platform’s standard home screen options. The app was acquired by Branch, a mobile analytics company, in July 2022. Branch is now laying off more than 100 people across the entire company, including the bulk of Nova’s team, according to Cliff Wade, Nova Launcher’s customer relations lead. There were previously “around a dozen people” working on Nova, Wainwright said.

The launcher will continue to work for anyone who’s already using it. And while the launcher has been developed by a team for many years now, it was a one-developer-job at the start. “The original Nova team, for many years, was just me,” Barry wrote in a post today, reflecting on the layoffs.